Link archive: October, 2014

99 Cent: A Look at the Widespread Confusion Over a Photo Gursky DIDN’T Shoot

A fascinating tale of mistaken identity with one of Lyza’s photos.

Hitler reacts to the HTML5 URL normative reference controversy

This is hilarious …for about two dozen people.

For everyone else, it’s as opaque as the rest of the standardisation process.

How URL started as UDI — a brief conversation with @timberners_lee @W3C #TPAC - Tantek

Tantek shares a fascinating history lesson from Tim Berners-Lee on how the IETF had him change his original nomenclature of UDI—Universal Document Identifier—to what we now use today: URL—Uniform Resource Locator.

Google Embraces Progressive Enhancement, from the notebook of Aaron Gustafson

I don’t tend to be a “magic pill” kind of believer, but I can honestly say that embracing progressive enhancement can radically change your business for the better. And I’m glad to see Google agrees with me.

The ride to 5 | HTML5 Doctor

HTML5 is now a W3C recommendation. Here’s what a bunch of people—myself included—have to say about that.

Beautiful Maps

Cartography porn.

Cursors

A self-describing list of cursors available through CSS.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Updating our technical Webmaster Guidelines

Google has updated its advice to people making websites, who might want to have those sites indexed by Google. There are two simple bits of advice: optimise for performance, and use progressive enhancement.

Just like modern browsers, our rendering engine might not support all of the technologies a page uses. Make sure your web design adheres to the principles of progressive enhancement as this helps our systems (and a wider range of browsers) see usable content and basic functionality when certain web design features are not yet supported.

Code for America — Responsive Web Design on Huffduffer

This was a fun podcast—myself and Cyd from Code For America talk to Karen and Ethan about how we worked together. Good times.

The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure.

Ignite Bristol 07 - Dan Williams - Walt Disney World - YouTube

I’m at Disney World for a special edition of An Event Apart, so this lightning talk from Dan Williams seems appropriate to revisit.

“Alan Bean Plus Four”

A warm-hearted short story about a moonshot. By Tom Hanks.

JS Bin: Vertical centering is impossible in CSS lol!

Four different techniques for vertical centring in CSS, courtesy of Jake.

Is Facebook building a colonial web? by Alice Newton

internet.org might more accurately be called very-small-piece-of-internet.org

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, Three - YouTube

Do you want to know what the truth is about shrimps? They’re the idiots of the sea! One time I saw a shrimp just swim right into a rock.

Axiomatic CSS and Lobotomized Owls · An A List Apart Article

I’m quite intrigued by the thinking behind this CSS selector of Heydon’s.

* + * {
    margin-top: 1.5em;
}

I should try it out and see how it feels.

Carrot

It Just Works.®™

Baby Steps - Petra Gregorová

Petra has always been the strong one. She was the best friend that Chloe could have possibly had. Little wonder then that Chloe’s death continues to hit her so hard.

I still can’t fully comprehend it all nor do I have any idea how to learn to move on. All I know is that ever since the day I found out, I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster. I go from being in shock, to being sad and angry, or completely numb.

Petra is getting help now. That’s good. She’s also writing about what she has been going through. That’s brave. Very brave.

She is one of the best human beings I know.

What is still on the web after 10 years of archiving? - UK Web Archive blog

The short answer: not much.

The UK Web Archive at The British Library outlines its process for determining just how bad the linkrot is after just one decade.

Replacing Radio Buttons Without Replacing Radio Buttons

A great technique from Heydon for styling radio buttons however you want.

Patty Toland — Design Consistency For The Responsive Web (Smashing Conference Freiburg 2014) on Vimeo

Patty’s excellent talk on responsive design and progressive enhancement. Stick around for question-and-answer session at the end, wherein I attempt to play hardball, but actually can’t conceal my admiration and the fact that I agree with every single word she said.

Petition · WHO: End the suffering of the Ebola crisis. Test and distribute homeopathy as quickly as possible to contain the outbreaks. · Change.org

Over 3,000 idiots and counting.

This is the intersection of Hanlon’s Razor with Clarke’s third law: any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

This would be funny if it weren’t, in a very literal sense, evil.

The Elon Musk interview on Mars colonisation – Ross Andersen – Aeon

Elon Musk talks engineering, the Fermi paradox, and getting your ass to Mars.

as days pass by — The next big thing is privacy

Stuart has written some wise words about making privacy the differentiator that can take on Facebook and Google.

He also talks about Aral’s ind.ie project; all the things they’re doing right, and all things they could do better:

The ind.ie project is to open source as Brewdog are to CAMRA.

Solved By Flexbox — Cleaner, hack-free CSS

Documenting common layout issues that can be solved with Flexbox. I like the fact that some of these can be used as enhancements e.g. sticky footer, input add-ons …the fallback in older browsers is perfectly acceptable.

ysltf on Huffduffer

Sam Greenspan from the brilliant 99% Invisible podcast has created a Huffduffer feed based on his “You Should Listen To Friday” Tumblr blog.

If you have a Huffduffer account, add this to your collective.

And definitely subscribe to this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice.

Ariel Waldman Talks About Science Hack Day: Triangulation 120 - YouTube

This is a great summation of the origins of Science Hack Day from Ariel.

Science Hack Day San Francisco 2014 Demos - YouTube

All the marvellous hacks from Science Hack Day San Francisco being demoed at the end of the event.

Mine is the first one up, five minutes in.

The boring front-end developer - Adam Silver, Front end developer, based in London

My name is Jeremy and I am a boring front-end developer.

Why I Joined the IndieWeb Movement - Wingin’ It

I hope that many of you will watch me on this journey, and follow in my wagon tracks as I leave the walled cities and strike out for the wilderness ahead.

Startups and Shit, HTML-first

The Android vs. iOS debate is one hinges around whether you think it makes more sense to target a (perceived) larger market, or target one that the technorati favor. But why choose? Building a good responsive web app has a series of benefits, the primary one being that you target users on every platform with one app. Every user. Every platform. All the time. Release whenever you want. A/B test with ease. Go, go go.

Science Hack Day San Francisco 2014 Teams - an album on Flickr

What a fantastic collection of creators!

Jerry Seinfeld’s Clio Acceptance Speech - YouTube

I feel that this is relevant to that discussion I had with Malarkey on his podcast about advertising.

How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?

A look back at how Twitter evolved over time, with examples of seemingly-trivial changes altering the nature of the discourse.

Kevin finishes with a timely warning for those of us building alternatives:

In the indieweb world we are just starting to connect sites together with webmentions, and we need to consider this history as we do.

Progressive Enhancement Basics

Some thoughts on progressive enhancement, although I disagree with the characterisation of progressive enhancement as being the opposite choice to making “something flashy that pushes the web to it’s limits”—it’s entirely possible to make the flashiest, limit-pushing sites using progressive enhancement. After all…

it’s much more a mindset than a particular development technique.

LHC Map

A lovely hack from Science Hack Day San Francisco: get an idea of the size of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider by seeing it superimposed over your town.

Science Hack Day: Serious Fun in the Making

It’s impossible to predict the creations that will spring forth when people gather in the spirit of participation, collaboration, and benign anarchy at the next Science Hack Day, but the results are certain to be inspired, and inspiring.

Blogging Known Style

Companies go out of business, get bought and change policies, so what if you had one place to originate all of your content then publish it out to those great social services? And hey, why not pull comments from those services back to your original post?

That’s the idea behind Indie Web Camp: have your own website be the canonical source of what your publish. But right now, getting all of the moving parts up and running requires a fair dollop of tech-savviness. That’s where Known comes in:

It’s similar to the WordPress model: you can create a blog on their servers, or you can download the software and host it on your own.

This post is a good run-down of what’s working well with Known, and what needs more work.

The Hummingbird Effect — How We Got to Now

How the printing press led to the microscope, and chlorination transformed women’s fashion—Steven Johnson channels James Burke.

Tabletop Whale

Beautiful visualisations of science and nature.

Made with love by a designer with a molecular biology degree.

ntlk’s blog: Why can’t you track periods in Apple’s Health app?

Good question.

JS Parse and Execution Time - TimKadlec.com

Tim’s been running the numbers on how long it takes various browsers on various devices to parse JavaScript—in this case, jQuery. The time varies enormously depending on the device hardware.

How We Could Actually Build a Space Colony - Popular Mechanics

This is basically porn for me.

Bernal spheres, Stanford tori, and O’Neill cylinders, oh my!

56 Experts reveal 3 beloved front-end development tools

Turns out that Brian LeRoux and I gave the same answer to this question:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript

I think I just saved you a click.

Physical Web by google

This is what Scott Jenson has been working on—a first stab at just-in-time interactions by having physical devices broadcasting URLs.

Walk up and use anything

if(version,startswith(“windows 9”) | source code search engine

This is fascinating—it looks like there might be an entirely practical reason for Microsoft to skip having a version 9 of Windows …and it’s down to crappy pattern-matching code that’s supposed to target Windows 95 and 98.

This is exactly like the crappy user-agent sniffing that forced browsers to lie in their user-agent strings.

OS X bash Update 1.0 – OS X Mavericks

Incredibly, you have to manually download and run this patch for Shellshock on OS X: it’s not being pushed as a security update.

But the new U2 album? That’s being pushed to everyone.